Prepared Remarks of CFPB Director Richard Cordray at the National Association of Attorneys General

Thank you, General Hood. As a former attorney general myself, I have made it a point to come here every year, and I am glad to be back for the fourth year running. I know there are many new faces in the audience, and I look forward to working with all of you on matters where we share common concerns.

To recap our brief history, in the wake of the recent financial crisis, Congress established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a new agency with a broad set of tools to address problems arising in the realm of consumer finance. These tools include rulemaking, supervision, enforcement, consumer complaint response, and consumer education. Our authority focuses on the marketplace for consumer financial products and services, including all aspects of household finance – matters such as mortgages, credit cards, student loans, auto loans, bank account products, debt collection, credit reporting, payday loans, consumer loans, prepaid cards, international money transfers, and more.

Robert F. Kennedy once said something that is apt for the work we all do: “The challenge of politics and public service is to discover what is interfering with justice and dignity for the individual here and now, and then to decide swiftly upon the appropriate remedies.” I have spoken with you before about some of these obstacles that interfere with justice and dignity for consumers – which we regularly refer to as “the four Ds.” We see them much too often: deceptive marketing, debt traps, dead ends, and discrimination. Today I would like to revisit these obstacles and describe some of the progress we are making to combat them.

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The first obstacle is deceptive marketing. It is obvious that consumers cannot make sound financial choices if they are given inaccurate or false information. But when key information is deliberately withheld, or when the information provided is misleading, consumers similarly have a hard time making sound choices.

One of our signature projects at the Consumer Bureau has been our “Know Before You Owe” effort to make information more understandable and more accessible to consumers. One way that many consumer financial contracts have become unhelpful to people is by creating confusion through their density and their sheer length. So we have worked to simplify the mortgage forms provided to consumers at the application and closing stages of the transaction. We have worked with and encouraged industry to make credit card disclosures easier to read. We have provided a student financial aid shopping sheet to help students and families make apples-to-apples comparisons between competing financial aid offers. And we have issued a proposed rule that presents the same kind of “Know Before You Owe” treatment for prepaid financial products and other prepaid accounts. All of this work reflects our view that consumer financial contracts have grown too long and complicated, which has come to serve consumers poorly over the years. And it needs to change.

But cleaning up deception in the marketplace also requires tough action, so we have taken on credit card companies that misled consumers with deceptive sales pitches and so far we have put well over a billion dollars back into the pockets of consumers for those and other unlawful practices. We have gone after companies that claimed to provide debt relief, but really were just taking people’s money and leaving them worse off. And we have often done this in partnership with you. In going after foreclosure relief scammers, for example, we have partnered with 15 attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission. And, in a joint filing with Florida’s attorney general, we went after a student debt relief company that misled borrowers into paying for what they believed was a special deal on federal loan benefits that they could have gotten for free.

One of the most objectionable experiences we have had to date has been with law firms that purport to be helping people resolve their debts, but really are misusing their law license to defraud consumers. These cases have provided some of our most protracted litigation, none of which has been a credit to the legal profession, including sanctions motions we had to file in some instances and criminal referrals we had to make in others.

We have also gone after companies that misleadingly promised servicemembers easy financing to buy computers, videogame consoles, TVs and other products while hiding the true cost of the financing of those goods. We partnered with 13 state attorneys general in that action to bring $92 million in relief to those customers. We thus expanded on work that had begun with the New York and Tennessee Attorneys General.

One particular issue that I want to raise with you today, which we have come to see as a larger problem of deception in the marketplace, involves the for-profit college industry. Some of these colleges have found that they can benefit when students take out large amounts of loans, regardless of the students’ long-term success in terms of graduation rates or job placement rates. The burden of these heavy loans on students who aspire to a brighter future is one of the most significant consumer issues facing young people today. We have joined some of you, along with a number of other federal agencies, to strategize about how to pool our efforts to understand and address this problem.

A prime example of this is Corinthian Colleges. We have worked with a number of you to investigate and sue Corinthian, one of the largest for-profit college chains in the country. We believe they lured in consumers with lies about their job prospects upon graduation, sold high-cost loans to pay for that false hope, and then harassed students for overdue debts while they were still in school. Corinthian deceived students about what they were buying and how they were paying for it.

Corinthian has performed so poorly over time that it is now in distress and its prospects for the future are increasingly dire. As the company is listing toward failure, it has sold off about $505 million in accumulated student loan debt and ultimately agreed to sell off many of its schools. The debt sale, in particular, threatened to undermine our enforcement action, which included among its possible remedies the rescission of this very same debt. ECMC Group, which sought to purchase many of the Corinthian campuses, agreed to a number of conditions before proceeding with the sale. First, it agreed not to offer a private student loan program for seven years. We also reached a multi-party agreement with the buyer of the student loan debt to forgive more than $480 million for current and former students who took out Corinthian’s high-cost private student loans.

This was a tremendously successful result for many thousands of young people and their families that had been seriously harmed by Corinthian’s deceptive marketing. We know that certain states still have outstanding actions against Corinthian – our lawsuit against Corinthian remains pending as well – and we intend to continue to provide you with as much support as we can. We also remain engaged with you in carefully scrutinizing the for-profit college industry, including our pending lawsuit against ITT and further work we are doing to identify issues and concerns with other for-profit chains of schools.

Today, I pledge to continue working with you on all these issues of deception in the marketplace. Fraud of any kind is a bread-and-butter law enforcement issue, and we must strike at it hard and effectively wherever it is harming consumers. I believe, consistent with our experience to date, that we can do this best when we do it together.

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Our second “D” is debt traps that cause people to get stuck in a downward spiral that can ruin their personal finances and devastate their lives. Products marketed as short-term solutions to immediate needs can be risky for consumers. People who do not have access to more traditional credit products and who find themselves in a tough situation with nowhere to turn may think their only option is some kind of short-term, high-cost loan such as a payday loan, an installment loan, or an auto title loan. But if they get trapped in these loans, the repayment terms can lead them to borrow again and again, over and over, in a repeating and self-defeating cycle.

The Consumer Bureau is the first federal agency to supervise payday lenders for compliance with federal consumer financial laws. Last year, we issued a report which found that payday loans put many consumers at risk of turning what is typically described as a short-term, emergency loan into a long-term, expensive debt burden. That extensive churn is central to the business models of many lenders. Borrowers who take out 11 or more loans each year account for about three-quarters of the fees generated. The bottom line is that too many consumers are finding themselves caught in a debt trap when they take out a payday loan.

We want to ensure consumers can get the credit they need without jeopardizing or undermining their finances. To this end, we have conducted examinations of a number of the larger payday lenders to evaluate their compliance and to secure relief for consumers who were harmed by violations of consumer financial laws. We also have used our enforcement tools to punish some of the most egregious practices. Last summer, we took action against ACE Cash Express, a large payday lender, for harassing and falsely threatening prosecution as a pressure tactic to get borrowers to take out additional loans they could not afford. A few months later we sued the Hydra Group, online payday lenders who were making loans to consumers and then debiting their accounts without ever obtaining their consent.

In parallel actions with several state attorneys general, we have also sued CashCall, an online payday loan servicer, for debiting consumer checking accounts illegally to secure payment for loans that were void. One of the companies involved said that state laws do not apply to its business because it is based on an Indian reservation and owned by a tribal member. We agree with you that this does not exempt the company in having to comply with state laws when it makes loans over the Internet to consumers in various states. We have been working closely with you to address these kinds of regulatory evasion schemes.

We are also now in the latter stages of considering how we can best formulate new rules to reform the market. We are going about this rulemaking with the clear knowledge that states were regulating payday lending before the Bureau even existed. That extensive and varied experience has shed light on the problems in this market and opportunities to craft measures that will benefit consumers. As we are considering federal regulation of these products, we appreciate and welcome the expertise you can share with us, including as you have the opportunity to review and evaluate the proposals we will be formulating for public notice and comment.

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A third type of problem for consumers is “dead ends.” When consumers have limited clout because they cannot choose the business they are dealing with, they lack the ultimate control of being able to sever their ties and take their business elsewhere. This is true even though what goes on in those markets can have a profound influence on their lives.

Take, for example, credit reporting. We know consumers have been complaining to your offices for years about problems with credit reporting – I am aware of it because we used to field these complaints when I was the Ohio Attorney General, and we get many similar complaints ourselves at the Consumer Bureau. Every consumer who seeks to make use of credit to help manage his or her financial affairs is affected by this industry, which has been something of a mystery for decades. For the first time ever, our new agency is exercising supervisory authority over the credit reporting companies. We also know that many of you have been pursuing your own work to look into this industry. So let me tell you about some of the things we are doing to pry it open, to help ensure that people are being treated fairly, and to make sure that consumers are not encountering dead end after dead end when they run into trouble.

First, when consumers see a problem with their credit report or credit score, they too often feel like they are getting the runaround. They do not always know where to turn, and if they cannot get the credit reporting companies to listen, they cannot get problems resolved. To amplify their voice in this process, people can use our consumer complaint response tool. We began accepting consumer complaints about credit reporting in October 2012, and they have poured in by the tens of thousands. In addressing these complaints, we have secured relief for many consumers in the form of simply correcting errors that they had been trying to resolve for months or even years.

On a wider scale, we are establishing clear and regular oversight by supervising the larger credit reporting companies and many of their largest furnishers. By means of this oversight, we are finding specific pain points for consumers, identifying problem areas, and working directly to improve responsiveness to consumer concerns. Working with the three nationwide credit reporting companies, we have secured important upgrades to e-OSCAR, which is the electronic system these companies use to notify furnishers of disputes. These changes are making it easier and more convenient for consumers to support their claims and get their disputes resolved correctly.

We also think the credit reporting industry has not been more responsive in the past because of a general lack of public awareness about what it is and what it does. If consumers do not understand how credit reporting matters to their lives, then they will not press creditors and credit reporting companies by monitoring the information contained in their own credit profile. Increased public awareness will provide the kind of pressure and stimulus that is necessary to prompt broader consumer-facing reforms. With the purpose of creating more transparency in this market, last year we launched an initiative to encourage credit card companies to make credit scoring information more easily and regularly available to their customers at no cost.

At the time, only a few credit card issuers – Barclays, Discover, and First National Bank of Omaha – shared their customers’ credit scores for no cost either online or on their paper billing statements. Now, more than a dozen issuers are providing credit scores directly and freely to their customers, and credit card issuers are now being joined by auto lenders, student loan servicers, and others. Through this initiative, over 50 million consumers already have the opportunity to see their credit scores regularly and that number is poised to grow much further.

The more people are noticing and getting to know more about their credit scores, the easier it will be for them to spot errors and concerns, and the more likely they will be to stimulate a new level of responsiveness from the credit reporting companies. As they become more familiar with credit reporting and credit scoring, they will also naturally learn more about how to improve their creditworthiness, making them into stronger and sturdier consumers, which is good for the economy and good for our country.

Another key market where we find many dead ends is debt collection. This too is a troublesome area that you are very familiar with and that you deal with constantly. While there are many legitimate debt collectors who work hard to play by the rules, every one of us hears all the time about harassing tactics such as incessant phone calls, relatives or associates being harassed, and false threats of arrest. These tactics are indefensible.

For decades, the attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission have been at the forefront of fighting unfair and deceptive practices by debt collectors. The problems are perennial. When I served in your ranks, we found that the investigations and lawsuits came thick and fast, because consumers were constantly crying out against the many abuses to which they were subjected.

At the Consumer Bureau, we have found over and over again that, regardless of the particular industry under scrutiny, debt collection efforts are a constant source of consumer harm. We have unearthed these problems in mortgage servicing and with credit cards, auto loans, student loans, and payday loans. We have found these problems in our supervisory examinations and in the course of investigating other issues for enforcement action. A large number of our enforcement actions that began by focusing on other violations of consumer financial laws have ended up including claims about debt collection also.

Importantly, under the Dodd-Frank Act, the Bureau became the first agency with authority to develop rules to implement the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. That statute was enacted in 1977 – the year I graduated from high school. Much has changed in the years since, but the law in this area has not kept up. So right now, we are hard at work analyzing and preparing the details of proposed policy measures, which could lead to the most significant changes in federal law in this area in almost forty years.

We face an immense task with this undertaking, but we knew immediately where we should look for the best guidance about how to handle it. So we have been seeking input from your teams and from the Federal Trade Commission. Very few policymakers can sit down and sketch a unified theory of the universe that actually fits the world around us. Better insight comes from those doing the relevant work, who can speak from their own experience. So we put out an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and later extended the deadline for comments so we could get more input from you and others. I am glad to know that you will be guiding us, and advising us, as we carry out this overhaul of federal debt collection law. With your counsel, we will reach results that are better informed and more balanced. For that, we thank you and we look forward to your ongoing participation as we advance in the rulemaking process.

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The fourth “D” we are taking on is discrimination. The greatest challenges some consumers face are rooted in unlawful treatment based on prohibited characteristics like race or national origin. So we are working to secure the right to equal treatment in the financial marketplace based on individual merit and responsibility.

Part of this work centers on greater transparency. At the Consumer Bureau, we agree with the first great consumer advocate, Justice Louis Brandeis, who said that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” In the same vein, public disclosure of information can be a powerful tool to address discrimination in lending. And so we are taking steps to expand transparency about people’s access to credit in the mortgage market by requiring more information to be disclosed to the public under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, or HMDA, which is the key federal law in this area.

We are also working to upgrade the technology underlying this data and to create more user-friendly tools that will help the public, consumer advocates, academics, and the mortgage industry itself work with and learn from this essential data. This information and the tools we are developing to present it more accessibly will help identify patterns in mortgage origination that may be discriminatory. And where we have identified such patterns, we have been working closely with the Justice Department to enforce the law and secure relief that will remediate the effects of past discrimination and put in place measures to prevent such discrimination in the future.

We are also keeping a watchful eye on the auto lending market. We are overseeing auto lending practices at the largest banks through our supervisory and enforcement authority as exercised by our strong fair lending team. We are moving forward with a proposed rule to begin to exercise our supervisory oversight over the larger nonbank auto finance companies as well. This is another important aspect of the work we are doing to level the playing field in these markets between banks and nonbank financial providers.

In addition, the Bureau has focused significant resources on rooting out discrimination in indirect auto lending. Examination and enforcement teams have reached resolutions to address practices that resulted in discrimination at several supervised institutions, which collectively are paying out approximately $136 million to provide redress for up to 425,000 consumers who were discriminated against on the basis of race.

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I can sum up my message today by stating that the Consumer Bureau fully intends to be the “cop on the beat” that was envisioned when the financial reform law was enacted. And so we join you in these determined and much-needed efforts. We are dedicated to making markets work better for consumers on foundations that are more sustainable over time.

And let me finish by pushing some of you to consider doing something many of your colleagues have already done, which would be quite helpful to you, your staff, and your constituents. At the Consumer Bureau, we have made the collection, investigation, and resolution of consumer complaints an integral part of our work. Last month alone we received over 20,000 complaints from consumers.

Because we are able to provide access to state agencies through a secure government portal, we want as many states as possible to make use of this information. This is key law enforcement data that you can analyze and build on in your daily work on consumer protection issues. It enables you to review complaints and even search and filter them by company, product, or issue. We now have 22 attorneys general and 28 state banking regulators who are already signed up and accessing this information through the secure portal. I strongly urge the rest of you to join us and do the same.

I am greatly encouraged by the work we have done together in just three-and-a-half years. Our publicly announced enforcement actions so far have resulted in $5.3 billion in relief to 15 million consumers and more than $200 million in civil money penalties. This can only happen with the input and close collaboration of our state and federal law enforcement partners. Like you and your teams, we are dedicated to serving the public. That is a high calling, and we are deeply appreciative of the opportunity we have been given here. We are proud to stand alongside you in the arena and strive to find ways to help improve people’s lives. Thank you.

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a 21st century agency that helps consumer finance markets work by making rules more effective, by consistently and fairly enforcing those rules, and by empowering consumers to take more control over their economic lives. For more information, visit consumerfinance.gov.